1864–1912 — Essayist of thought and character
As a Man Thinketh is about seven thousand words long and has never been out of print since 1903. Allen wrote it in a cottage in Devon, having given up a clerk's salary to write full time, and he was dead nine years later at forty-seven.
Allen was born in Leicester to a working-class family. His father travelled to America looking for work and died there in 1879; the fifteen-year-old Allen left school and took factory and clerical work to keep the household going.
He read constantly — Buddhist and Christian scripture, Tolstoy, Emerson — and worked as a private secretary until 1902, when he gave up the position, moved to Ilfracombe on the north Devon coast, and wrote full time on a very small income. He produced around nineteen books in the decade that remained to him, and edited a magazine alongside them. He died in 1912.
As a Man Thinketh takes a single line from Proverbs and works it out across seven short essays. The argument is that character is the accumulated result of thought, that circumstance reveals character rather than creating it, and that a person who alters the habitual quality of their thinking alters the conditions that follow.
Allen is the most austere writer in this lineage. There is no technique here, no decree, no scene to rehearse. There is only the claim that thought is causal in the long run and that discipline is the whole of the method.
Partly the brevity — you can read the whole book in under an hour. Mostly the tone. Allen promises nothing and asks for everything, which has aged better than the confident prosperity writing of the same decade.
The honest criticism is that he leaves no room for circumstance you did not make: illness, poverty, the accidents of birth. Read him as a book about the part that is yours to govern and he holds up.
A man is literally what he thinks, his character being the complete sum of all his thoughts.
As a Man Thinketh, 1903
It argues that character is the accumulated result of habitual thought, that circumstances reveal the mind that formed them, and that changing the quality of one's thinking over time changes the conditions that follow. It offers a discipline rather than a technique.
Yes. It was published in 1903 and is in the public domain. The complete text is in our Source Archive at no cost and with no email required.
About forty-five minutes to an hour. It is roughly seven thousand words in seven short essays.
Dates and biographical details follow the published record. Quotations are reproduced verbatim from the editions named beside them; where we host the text in full, the citation links to it.